Irons
Iron Set Session
About two hours across the middle of your bag, which for most of our clients means seven clubs doing eighty per cent of the approach work. The session ends with a set makeup recommendation as often as it ends with a shaft recommendation, and the two are related.
The Strike Map Comes Before Anything Else
Face tape on your own seven iron, ten shots, and a photograph. That single sheet of data decides most of what follows. A pattern clustered low toward the heel points at lie angle and length. A pattern smeared across the face vertically points at delivery rather than equipment. A pattern sitting consistently high on the toe usually means the club is too long for the posture the golfer actually adopts, whatever the wrist-to-floor chart said.
Only after that do the racks come out. Fitting a head to a golfer whose contact is off centre in a repeatable direction is fitting the wrong problem, and the correction is often a bending bar and a quarter inch rather than a new set.
Forgiveness Is a Trade, Not a Free Gift
Iron heads sit on a spectrum from wide-soled and heavily perimeter weighted through to compact and thin. The industry sells the wide end on forgiveness and the compact end on feel, and both claims are broadly true. What gets left out is the cost on either side.
Wide sole, strong loft
Genuinely easier to launch and more tolerant of a thin strike. Costs you descent angle, which matters on firm August greens, and can leave the set gapping badly at the bottom.
Mid category
Where most of our builds land. Enough sole to survive a heavy strike, enough loft integrity to keep the wedge ladder sensible underneath it.
Compact players heads
Better turf feedback and shot shaping. Punishes an off-centre strike hard, which for a twenty handicap means the good rounds get slightly better and the bad ones get worse.
The loft point deserves more attention than it gets. When a manufacturer strengthens a seven iron by three degrees and calls it distance, it has not made the club longer in any useful sense. It has moved the whole ladder down, and the golfer now needs an extra wedge at the bottom to fill the hole that opened up. We check that ladder before signing off on any head.
Where Your Set Should Stop Being Irons
This is the most useful and least popular conversation in the session. Somewhere in every bag there is a club where the iron stops producing enough height to hold a green, and for a golfer with a moderate delivery that crossover point is higher up the set than pride allows for. Five irons that launch at a shallow angle and land running are not approach clubs. They are long chip shots with extra steps.
We find the crossover by measuring peak height and descent angle rather than by asking how far each club goes. Once a club drops below the angle that will stop on a firm green, it comes out and something with a lower centre of gravity goes in. For a lot of our clients that means the set runs from six iron down and there is a hybrid or a high lofted fairway wood above it.
Nobody has ever regretted retiring a four iron. Several people have regretted keeping one for a year longer than it deserved.
Weight First, Then Profile, Then Everything Else
Iron shafts get chosen by weight band before anything else, because weight sets tempo and tempo sets your strike consistency. Steel through the high nineties and low hundreds suits most of our players. Graphite in the seventy to ninety gram range is the fastest growing part of this business, driven almost entirely by golfers over sixty who have been fighting a set built for the swing they had a decade ago.
After weight comes profile: where along the shaft the bending happens, which changes launch and how the club feels arriving at the ball. Then length, lie and grip, in that order, and finally the swingweight target that gets written on the sheet so a future regrip cannot quietly undo it.
- Constant weight or ascending weight layouts, chosen on how your short irons behave rather than on principle
- Lie angles set individually per club, not as a single blanket adjustment across the set
- Length checked against dynamic posture, since static charts and real address positions disagree often
- Grip size measured by fingertip position, then tuned with tape wraps rather than by jumping a whole size
- Swingweight matched across the set on the bench, to within half a point on anything built here